Abstract. By using the non-relativistic effective Lagrangian approach to bound states, a complete expression for the isospin-breaking corrections to the energy levels and the decay widths of kaonic hydrogen is obtained up-to-and-including O(α, m d − mu) in QCD. It is demonstrated that, although the leading-order corrections at O(α 1/2 , (m d − mu) 1/2 ) emerging due to the unitarity cusp, are huge, they can be expressed solely in terms of the KN S-wave scattering lengths. Consequently, at leading order, it is possible to derive parameter-free modified Deser-type relations, which can be used to extract the scattering lengths from the hadronic atom data.

The extraction of the S-wave kaon-nucleon scattering lengths a0 and a1 from a combined analysis of existing kaonic hydrogen and synthetic deuterium data has been carried out within the framework of a low-energy effective field theory. It turns out that with the present DEAR central values for the kaonic hydrogen ground-state energy and width, a solution for a0 and a1 exists only in a restricted domain of input values for the kaon-deuteron scattering length. Consequently, measuring this scattering length imposes stringent constraints on the theoretical description of the kaon-deuteron interactions at low energies.

Abstract. We use the framework of effective field theories to discuss the determination of the S-wave πN scattering lengths from the recent high-precision measurements of pionic deuterium observables. The theoretical analysis proceeds in several steps. Initially, the precise value of the pion-deuteron scattering length a πd is extracted from the data. Next, a πd is related to the S-wave πN scattering lengths a+ and a−. We discuss the use of this information for constraining the values of these scattering lengths in the full analysis, which also includes the input from the pionic hydrogen energy shift and width measurements, and throughly investigate the accuracy limits for this procedure. In this paper, we also give a detailed comparison to other effective field theory approaches, as well as with the earlier work on the subject, carried out within the potential model and multiple scattering framework.

It is shown that isospin-breaking corrections to the pion-deuteron scattering length can be very large, because of the vanishing of the isospin-symmetric contribution to this scattering length at leading order in chiral perturbation theory. We further demonstrate that these corrections can explain the bulk of the discrepancy between the recent experimental data on pionic hydrogen and pionic deuterium. We also give the first determination of the electromagnetic low-energy constant f1.

The possibility of an nnΛ bound state is investigated in the framework of pionless effective field theory at leading order. A system of coupled integral equations are constructed in the spin-isospin basis, of which numerical solutions are investigated. In particular, we make use of the limit cycle behavior, i.e., cyclic singularities of coupled integral equations of the system, which would be associated with the formation of a three-body bound state, so-called the Efimov state, in the unitary limit. Furthermore, we find that, when the sharp momentum cutoff introduced in the integral equations is taken significantly larger than the hard scale of the effective theory, the coupling of a three-body contact interaction becomes cyclically singular indicating the onset of Efimov-like bound state formation. However, the paucity of empirical information to determine the parameters of the theory precludes a definitive conclusion on the existence of such a bound state. As a simple test of the feasibility of the nnΛ bound system in nature, we explore the cutoff dependence of the theory, and uncertainties of the present study are discussed as well.